


No One Else on Earth

by Lafayette1777



Category: Saturday Night Live, Saturday Night Live RPF, Weekend Update (SNL)
Genre: Angst, Developing Relationship, M/M, Pining, Relationship Confusion, aaaand im back, and as always:, but everything hurts and there's no comedy, cause oh my god, comedy husbands, everyone is bisexual and sleep-deprived, go watch their lie detector interview if you haven't already, with that good good, yall know how it is
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-03
Updated: 2019-03-03
Packaged: 2019-11-08 18:51:47
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,942
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17986700
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lafayette1777/pseuds/Lafayette1777
Summary: It shouldn’t be this difficult, Che thinks. And yet somehow, in this life of his, it always is.





	No One Else on Earth

**Author's Note:**

> i have spent a supremely absurd amount of time in the standby line these last few weeks, so here we are again. since writing my last chost fics i have moved to nyc for college, which means that one of lorne’s snipers could take me out at any moment for writing this. so i hope you all appreciate the risk im taking here. catch me on the B train looking furtively over my shoulder.  
> would you believe i actually tried to make this less angsty and physically couldn’t?? like idk about yall but i can feel che pining so hard through his crazy ig stories and i just couldn’t keep the angst in any longer
> 
> but anyways if you haven't seen the vanity fair interview where these two take a lie detector test you should go watch it!!! i mean it's nonessential to the fic but it's really really cute regardless
> 
> the usual disclaimer: please god don't let anyone even remotely connected to snl see this. it's fiction!!!!
> 
> to be real though, thanks so much for reading and keeping chost alive!!

On Tuesday, Che wanders over to the graphic design team to see how well the photoshopping of Colin’s head onto Chris Christie’s body is going—very well indeed, as it turns out—and is back up in his office by noon, stretching out across the couch in the corner for a midday nap. He’s only just begun to nod off when a shadow falls over him, and then a hefty stack of blue pages lands on his chest and vaults him back to consciousness.

“Jost,” he groans, without opening his eyes. He swings an arm out haphazardly and feels the rush of air as Colin sidesteps the blow.

“You can’t kill me if you can't reach me.” Colin lands heavily in Che’s desk chair across the room, grinning wider than he has any right to be. “Your ‘what if the Patriots were secretly aliens’ sketch is a go, by the way.”

Che shimmies up until his legs no longer hang off the end of the couch. He rubs at his eyes, stripping himself of a layer of midweek ennui to look directly at Colin until he feels something inside him shift. They meet eyes, and Che thinks about lie detectors, distantly. About the fear of being asked something he can’t answer. 

“Do you want to come over tonight?” Colin asks, but not without glancing briskly in the direction of the door first.

“Do you want me to?” Michael says carefully, feeling as though he’s forcing the words through a fine, delicate mesh. Colin is almost smiling, it seems. They both are.

“I always do.”

Then Kate is in the doorway, launching into some logistical inanity and leaving Che feeling clammy and far away. He gets to his feet and crosses to the window, points his gaze down at the gray expanse of sidewalk. It shouldn’t be this difficult, he thinks. And yet somehow, in this life of his, it always is.

 

 

Michael has recently discovered a crevice of Youtube previously unknown to him: white noise tracks. Rain on leaves, chill beats to relax/study to, nine hours of Gregorian chanting. In headphones, he feels submerged. Everyone at SNL has a preference for immersion, he thinks. A yearning to be subsumed by something. If not the show, than whatever’s available. When he needs to write, and not listen out for Colin—for the edges of him, around the office, his bubbling laugh and the click of his shoes—he cues up the sound of sea ice cracking apart, of water surging up from below. Six hours of it.

But peace never lasts. Colin usually comes by at least three times a day, under the pretense of a show issue or, if not, just to complain about the giraffe in his office. “It _stares_ at me,” he says. “The eyes follow me.”

“How could you say that about the symbol of my love for you?” Che says, smirking. Because it was a joke, and he’s good at that. When it’s a joke, he knows where they stand. He gave the gigantic stuffed giraffe to Colin last Valentine’s Day, in one of his usual weekly attempts to have Colin inconvenienced and/or assassinated. Some would call it love. “You know giraffes are endangered now, right? You’re lucky I got you one while they’re still even in the cultural memory.”

Colin barks out a laugh, the way he does every time Michael so much as hiccups. “You know Michael, I don’t care what everyone says. You _are_ a good friend.”

Che raises his eyebrows, smiling skeptically. “We’re not friends, Colin.”

“Sorry. Coworkers.”

“I consider you my employee, but you keep telling yourself that.”

Colin laughs again and Che snorts at him with something as uncharacteristic, as foreign, as embarrassment. They meet eyes in that way they’re prone to do. The smile slips from Colin’s face. He tilts his head, just slightly, and Michael wonders distantly what his own face is doing, though he suspects that it must be strange. Or perhaps just bare.

“Tonight sounds good,” Che says, taking a breath. He thinks, desperately, about Chris Christie, about Wally the cue card guy, about anything related to the Senate, and manages to control his heart rate. 

“Good,” says Colin, the smile coming back. He touches Che’s shoulder on his way out. Che slips his headphones back on hastily; the sea ice, once again, resumes its slow, echoing destruction.

 

 

The situation is this: they slept together, drunk, at an afterparty. And instead of letting it turn awkward and awful and ruin everything, they’ve kept sleeping together, sporadically, sometimes drunk and sometimes not. But they aren’t dating. Or calling it anything at all, actually, except perhaps just _a secret_. Because Colin has a girlfriend—one who travels a lot and is actually in Tokyo shooting a movie for the next six weeks, as it happens. One who Michael goes to great lengths not to think about, out of some pathetic combination of pity and jealousy. 

The fact of it is that Michael cannot imagine any universe in which he dates Colin Jost. There is no reality where that makes sense—where it doesn’t end poorly on a personal level, or tear apart both their careers, or both. He tries to imagine taking Colin’s hand, boarding the ferry to Staten Island, meeting the Jost clan and not feeling completely ridiculous. Not feeling as if it’s all just some elaborate joke.

Sometimes, when it’s night and there’s no show and no headphones, he can’t help but think about how he got here. About the screenshot of that first text that Colin sent him still languishing in camera roll, recruiting him for the show and placing him squarely before the eyes of the world. About how there’s no one else on Earth who has changed his life as much as Colin Jost. 

“Do you want food?” Colin asks as they step out onto the pavement at the end of Tuesday night. They are alone; both have become adept at escaping, unnoticed, only to rejoin each other later in some more anonymous corner of the world.

“Are you offering to buy me dinner?” Che asks, quirking an eyebrow upwards.

“Only the best for you,” Colin replies, sidling over to the nearest halal truck with a wink. Che throws out an arm to encircle Colin's shoulders and, with a quick, fervent look to confirm their privacy, pulls him into a kiss beneath the fluorescent lights of the truck awning. The moment elongates; Michael feels himself unravel, just slightly, as the warmth of Colin presses against him. As a hand comes up to the back of his neck, and another flicks against where his hoodie meets his waistband. The city shrinks in around them, protects them, embraces them like the night.

And then Colin is pulling back and looking at him and Che is expecting a rebuke, some kind of comment about discretion, but all Colin says is “I think I want a lamb gyro.”

He turns and wanders toward the truck and Che watches him go. Watches the light from the truck interlace with the glow of a nearby Duane Reade. Colin looks back at him, smiles impenetrably. Che thinks again, distantly, of lie detectors and all the things the things they don’t answer. Won’t even ask.

 

 

Colin leaves early in the morning to head to the gym before they have to be back in the studio, so Che wakes to a rapidly cooling bed. In the office, Wednesday is off to a vigorous start, but the previous night with Colin has revitalized him—the Update rewrites feel manageable, the logistics reasonable, the meetings with Lorne and the rest of the head writers uneventful. At lunch he comes up with a couple more entertaining lies to tell about Colin on Instagram, and smirks at his own comedic ingenuity. The day could almost be rote, if a job like this could ever be called such a thing. Not for the first time, he wonders if there’s a terminal velocity to be achieved at SNL, and if he’s reached it. If one day it won’t be enough anymore. 

Late in the night he glances out his office window, down towards the ice rink in the plaza, and sees the digital short crew wrapping up a shoot, Colin just visible off to the side. Against his own will, Che thinks about going down there, about the two of them alone on the ice in the cool dark. How inherently, stupidly romantic it would all be. He shakes his head, dissolves the thought, and trots instead toward Colin’s office, where he curls up on the couch and nods off easily in the warm twilight of the room, the distant sounds of the city leaking in from around the window pane.

In the morning, he finds himself draped in a suit jacket that is not his own. His phone has been removed from his hand is plugged in on Colin’s desk. The room is empty.

 

 

Before noon, he goes to Leslie, and asks for her list of salacious sounding white-colored foods. She pulls out a steno pad from her desk drawer. He scans the list twice, then decides on “you luscious clove of garlic.” Leslie gives him a pitying look.

 

 

They’d been told about the Vanity Fair lie detector interview only a few weeks before it was scheduled, and were instructed to bring pre-prepared questions to ask each other. Che had written his the morning of and not thought much of it—he would do his usual best to embarrass Colin, if for no other reason than just to see him laugh. And so he’d written out a few ideas and let the rest of it come naturally once Colin was hooked up to the machine, grinning expectantly. 

It was only when Michael himself was attached to all the various wires and monitors that he became aware of what Colin could ask. Of all the many things that Che does not feel able to answer about what lies between the two of them. But, of course, Colin hadn’t asked anything risky. It was an interview; meant to be for fun, for promotional purposes. Not an interrogation of anyone’s attachments. But, for Che, the questions that could’ve been asked still linger. The fact of it is, perhaps, that he had wanted Colin to say something, to force him to tell all. To propel them both forward, out of the shadows and into the light.

On Thursday night Che is out of the building by eight, leaving Colin with Kate on a writing binge in her office. Outside, a light snow has begun to fall, and he can see the tail end of the standby line snaking around the end of forty-eighth street onto sixth avenue. The world feels hushed and soft and truthful, somehow. Or maybe just unscrutinized. At home, he falls asleep to the lull of Gregorian chants, wondering if Colin is doing the same thing. The sleeping, that is. Not the chants.

 

 

On Saturday afternoon they eat a long lunch and select what they’ll try out at the dress rehearsal, even though Che feels decisively and abruptly unsatisfied with everything he’s written all week. Nothing is flowing as it should; none of the risks feel likely to pay off. He leans back heavily in his chair and lets out a breath that must have an edge to it, because Colin looks up from his burrito.

“Good?” he asks, fixing Michael with a long look.

Che just grunts, eyes on the ceiling.

“You can always just wing it.” Colin sits back in his chair as well, a smile pulling at his mouth. “Roast of Jost, if need be.”

“When’s your girlfriend coming back?” Che asks, the words pulling themselves out of thin air. He feels like a conduit, hardly in control of his own actions. 

Colin freezes, but his expression gives nothing away. “I don’t know.”

“How do you not know when your girlfriend’s gonna be back in the country?”

“I mean, I don’t know when I’ll see her again.” Colin’s gaze is wandering the room. “We fought before she left. Haven’t heard anything in a while.”

Che narrows his eyes at him.

“So I don’t really know where I stand with her.”

“You should probably figure that out,” says Che, finally, voice brittle.

Colin looks at him evenly. “I guess I could ask.”

And then Leslie’s in the doorway, asking questions about script modifications, and Colin is being pulled back into the fray of work. Their eyes meet, once, as he stands to go, and then Che is alone.

 

 

The dress rehearsal Update falls flat, but by the end of it the dam has broken and Che writes furiously in the hour between the end of the rehearsal and the beginning of the live show. The Christie/Colin hybrid is tossed out. The first cue card guy he can find rolls his eyes at all the changes but sets to work. By the time the desk is pushed into place and Colin is striding ahead of him toward the set, Che feels closer to confident, even as he sprints through the countdown. 

The intro plays. Colin meets his eyes across the stage, raises his middle finger in their usual salute, and Che returns it. Then the lights are on them, clotting over them like sea ice, and Che is submerged. They’re live. That’s all that matters.

 

 

He’s not drunk, properly, until the second after party. The morning is close to breaking, but the darkness of the bar the cast has stuffed itself into preserves the night for their pleasure. Colin and Leslie are the only ones still standing, slow dancing in languid circles in the center of the room, Leslie’s hands in Colin’s back pockets and his face in her neck. Che saw them locked in conversation earlier in the night, when they were all still in a preppy uptown club, but now the capacity to speak seems to have abandoned the group as a whole. Pete is draped over the seat next to him and Alex is curled up in the booth opposite. Che sips his half-gone drink and lets his mind wander back to the show, to the moment at the core of it. 

At the end of Update, as the camera pulled back and away, Che had held out his hand for the usual shake and Colin had taken it and pulled him in close, placed a hand on Michael’s shoulder, eyes clear and true. The audience, the applause, the writhing mass of crew members in his periphery had all fallen away, his world winnowing down to only the point of contact between their palms. Neither of them said a word. The closeness of the moment had shaken him, lifted him up off his axis. 

For a split second, he was sure of one thing: they are tethered, undeniably. It isn’t all in his head.

Had it looked like a joke? Michael wondered, at the time. Would it look like a joke if he had threaded a hand through Colin's hair and kissed him? 

He can still feel the gravity of those few seconds in his bones, even if he doesn’t entirely understand what it means. The cameras had still been rolling; he’s tempted to find the clip and play it back, again and again, until the meaning of it materializes like ground beneath his feet.

At some point, Colin appears beside him, reaching down to throw back the rest of Che’s drink. “Let’s get out of here,” he says, frowning.

Without a thought, Che follows him onto the street and into a blast of cold air that forces them to shuffle closer to each other for warmth. Colin scans the street like he’s looking for a cab, and Che scans him.

“You call your girlfriend yet?” he asks, shoulders bunched tight against the cold.

Colin doesn’t miss a beat. “No.”

The word releases something in Michael that he hadn’t realized was barricaded. His muscles unlock; his head droops into the collar of his hoodie so that he has to lift his face when Colin leans in to kiss him.

 

 

On Sundays, Che knows only warmth.

Sunlight ripples in slants across his bedsheets. He awakes with his face pressed into Colin’s shoulder and he stays like that for a while, motionless, watching Colin flip through an old _New Yorker_ , his hair mussed and his glasses crooked. When he realizes Che is awake, he shifts to meet his eyes, the magazine dropping to the floor. They share a pillow, faces inches apart, every breath shared between them a prayer, a joke, a question. A silent, soothing chant.

“Do you want to have brunch?” Colin asks, finally.

“There is no fucking way you’re gonna catch me getting up for mimosas with all the white girls in SoHo—”

Colin smiles, raising the phone in his hand. “I was gonna have it delivered.”

“Oh,” replies Che. “Then yes, I’ll allow that, you luscious clove of garlic.”

Colin giggles, hunching back over his phone, and Che settles his gaze on him. He follows the familiar curves of Colin’s face with his eyes. The questions rise in him again, the asks and the answers all swelling upwards, but he pushes them away. He’ll have Colin in whatever way he can for as long as he can, he decides. That will have to be enough. He thinks about saying that enormous truth: _you’ve changed my life more than anyone else_. Or maybe just, _I want more than you can give me_. But, in the end, he doesn't say anything at all.

**Author's Note:**

> lafayette1777.tumblr.com


End file.
